indefatigable

malaise

But then, the same day, PaidContent's founder Rafat Ali tweeted this: “Hearing unverified about 5 or so edit people at AOL resigned yesterday. Any specific reason besides general malaise?”

Back in July, Arianna Huffington's site caught flak for its aggregation practices. It suspended young reporter Amy Lee for exhibiting shoddy ethics, angering most critics who felt that the aggregation problem was endemic to the organization.

At the time, business editor Peter Goodman, himself a respected former Times staffer, defended his new outlet. Goodman said that a specific problem was being addressed, that such aggregation practices were not widespread or tolerated at HuffPost and that the site would “redouble efforts to make sure our reporters and editors understand that this sort of thing is unambiguously unacceptable.”

When Egan was pressed about her departure, she declined to go into detail. One can't read too much into that, but it is safe to assume that if it were entirely cordial she would have said as much — or stayed more than five months.

redux

Wikipedia Redux (literary term) defines it as: «Redux is a post-positive adjective meaning “brought back, restored” (from Latin reducere, “to bring back”) used in literature and film titles.». Also note, the film titled Apocalypse Now Redux.

Redux = Brought back; returned. Used postpositively. (AHD)

anodyne

The axiom of choice states that if you have a collection of sets, you can always form a new set by choosing one object from each of them. That sounds anodyne, but it comes with a sting: you can dream up some twisted initial sets that produce even stranger sets when you choose one element from each. The Polish mathematicians Stefan Banach and Alfred Tarski soon showed how the axiom could be used to divide the set of points defining a spherical ball into six subsets which could then be slid around to produce two balls of the same size as the original. That was a symptom of a fundamental problem: the axiom allowed peculiarlyperverse sets of real numbers to exist whose properties could never be determined. If so, this was a grim portent for ever proving the continuum hypothesis.

remonstrate

Every once in a while, however, the mood would get “very ugly” and she would try to calm things down and remonstrate with people. “I would occasionally email them – they had to give their email addresses when registering for the site – to say, ‘Even though you are not writing under your real name, people can hear you.’” In those instances, strangely, she suggests, most people were incredibly contrite when contacted. It was like they had forgotten who they were. “They would send messages back saying, ‘Oh, I'm so sorry’, not even using the excuse of having a bad day or anything like that. It is so much to do with anonymity…”

culpability

Historians such as Herbert Bix, Akira Fujiwara, Peter Wetzler, and Akira Yamada assert that the post-war view focusing on imperial conferences misses the importance of numerous “behind the chrysanthemum curtain” meetings where the real decisions were made between the Emperor, his chiefs of staff, and the cabinet. Historians such as Fujiwara and Wetzler, based on the primary sources and the
monumental work of Shirō Hara, have produced evidence suggesting that the Emperor worked through intermediaries to exercise a great deal of control over the military and was neither bellicose nor a pacifist, but an opportunist who governed in a pluralistic decision-making process. American historian Herbert Bix argues that Emperor Shōwa might have been the prime mover of most of the events of the two wars.

The view promoted by both the Japanese Imperial Palace and the American occupation forces immediately after World War II had Emperor Shōwa as a powerless figurehead behaving strictly according to
protocol, while remaining at a distance from the decision-making processes. This view was endorsed by Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita in a speech on the day of Hirohito's death, in which Takeshita asserted that the war had broken out against [Hirohito's] wishes. Takeshita's statement provoked outrage in nations in East Asia and Commonwealth nations such as the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand and Canada. For Fujiwara, however, “the thesis that the Emperor, as an organ of responsibility, could not reverse cabinet decision, is a myth fabricated after the war.”

In Japan, debate over the Emperor's responsibility was taboo while he was still alive. After his death, however, debate began to surface over the extent of his involvement and thus his culpability.

peripatetic

Derrick Henry “Dick” Lehmer (1905 – 1991) was an American mathematician who refined Édouard Lucas' work in the 1930s and devised the Lucas–Lehmer test for Mersenne primes. Lehmer's peripatetic career as a number theorist, with he and his wife taking numerous types of work in the United States and abroad to support themselves during the Great Depression, fortuitously brought him into the center of research into early electronic computing.

redoubtable

Historic sources present disparate accounts of Ivan's complex personality: he was described as intelligent and devout, yet given to rages and prone to episodic outbreaks of mental illness. One notable outburst may have resulted in the death of his groomed and chosen heir Ivan Ivanovich, which led to the passing of the Tsardom to the younger son: the weak and possibly intellectually disabled Feodor I of Russia. His contemporaries called him “Ivan Groznyi” the name, which, although usually translated as “Terrible”, actually means something closer to “Redoubtable” or “Severe” and carries connotations of might, power and strictness rather than horror or cruelty.

prognostication

Yes, I know — everyone's been rushing to proclaim Silverlight dead for more than a year now. In fact, I'm frequently cited as the source of that prognostication, in spite of the fact that all I've actually reported is that Microsoft's strategy with Silverlight shifted and that Silverlight is no longer Microsoft's cross-platform runtime solution. Instead, Microsoft currently positions Silverlight as a tool for creating rich media, line-of-business and smartphone apps.

Will there be a Silverlight 6 (and does it matter)?2011-11-08 By Mary Jo Foley. @ www.zdnet.com…